Monday, April 26, 2004
[Tech] So XP is up & running and all of the applications that I thought might give it some grief (games) seem to be coping just fine. I put it down to the reformat & fresh install with all the latest drivers. Today I thought I'd follow PC Authority's advice & try out a few alternates for e-mail and mp3 production.
Today's winner is Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail, while today's loser is Apple iTunes 4.2 for music. The review of iTunes said everything was simple & would work straight after installation. The review highlighted the full speed ripping and burning (versus the crippled ripping and burning of other media centres like Winamp 5 and Musicmatch Jukebox - my previous choice). Not so, well not for me in any case. I try to play CDs and all I can hear is a popping or ticking. Ditto for ripping. Apple's support forums haven't been a huge help, but I'm running Windows Update over the machine at the moment and updating drivers as a last resort. If this doesn't work I'm going to the more-labourious two-step process of EAC for extraction and LAME for mp3 encoding. On the upside iTunes plays my already ripped files just fine and I prefer its visualisations over Winamp 5's.
I've also been playing around with this site this afternoon - different colours, tables, frames - but for now I've only added one small table (media consumption) at the bottom of the page. Suggestions on layout & colours welcome.
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